1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to product feed apparatus and associated equipment for the manufacture of food products.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The particular problem in the prior art which prompted development of the present product feed apparatus is the difficulty of automatically transferring a plurality of cookies from a single cookie holder to a plurality of conveyor lines for subsequent combination of the cookies with other cookies to form ice cream sandwiches. However, as will be seen the present invention is also adapted to handle products other than cookies.
Ice cream cookie sandwiches are very popular and a number of dairies of modest size compete for this market. Typically, dairy employees arrange cookies on large trays, perhaps four cookies wide, and operate an ice cream machine having feed spouts or nozzles to deposit a layer of ice cream on each of the cookies. Other employees then manually place other cookies on top of the ice cream layers to form the desired sandwiches, exercising care to make the overall height of the sandwiches uniform to fit within standard size packages. The operation is tedious and time-consuming and requires an inordinately high number of employees. In addition, the uniformity and quality of the finished ice cream sandwiches occasionally suffer because of the manual character of the operation.
More complex equipment is available to form ice cream sandwiches, but such equipment is quite expensive and is not adapted to handle round cookies. In addition, the size and consequent lack of mobility render the equipment unsuitable for the average small dairy or like user. Moreover, such equipment is usually characterized by a feed mechanism having a number of product holders corresponding to the number of conveyor lines involved. Stacks of the products are held in these holders adjacent the conveyor lines, respectively, and a number of transfer devices are employed to move the products from each holder to the adjacent conveyor line. The equipment attendants must thus exercise care to ensure that all of the holders are kept filled during operation of the equipment.
Aside from the deficiencies of the product feed apparatus of the prior art, there is also a need for a relatively simple and inexpensive machine for manufacturing ice cream sandwiches or the like, particularly round sandwiches, in a rapid, uniform, and reliable manner.